Paseo de Yeserías

The name comes from a trade that smelled of white dust. On this bank of the Manzanares, downstream of the Puente de Toledo, the plaster works operated: kilns and factories firing the plaster that built much of Madrid. The road linking them ended up named after them, and from that camino de las Yeserías came today’s paseo de Yeserías, fixed with that name in 1860. Earlier it had a grimmer title. The first stretch was known as paseo del Cristo de las Injurias, after the image venerated nearby. The Las Injurias neighborhood took its name from that same devotion, a dense cluster of shacks where the people the rest of the city preferred not to see lived. Today the promenade runs parallel to Madrid Río, with its bike lane opened in 2019, and nothing smells of kilns anymore. But the name still names those who kneaded the city’s plaster while living on its edge.